In Praise of Jargon

It's easy to sneer at academic journals. But they make even the best general-interest magazines look like thin gruel.

The Chronicle

By Cass R. Sunstein FEBRUARY 14, 2016

When I served in the Obama administration, some of my colleagues, who had recently been academics, wondered, with something like despair, how they could ever return to academic life. "After this," they wondered, "what could possibly be the point of going back to write academic articles?" When I asked them to elaborate, one of them sent me this quotation from Theodore Roosevelt:

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.

On Writing

Steven Pinker has made the case that — along with wearing earth tones and driving Priuses — professors can be identified by their bad writing. The rise of this opaque technical language, academese, is not a spontaneous occurrence; in fact, it has deep roots in the psychology of academe.

You can probably think of a colleague, a grad student, or a friend who could use a little straight talk on the subject.

That's why we've compiled a collection for Chroniclesubscribers, downloadable below. In it, Pinker diagnoses what ails academic writing, and four experts offer advice on potential cures.

Downloading is simple: Click here.

Wherever they are, academics are not in the arena. Their faces are rarely marred by dust, sweat, or blood. (If so, they are in the wrong profession.) They do not really know either victory or defeat. (Having an article accepted or rejected doesn't exactly count.) Few people may read what they write, no matter how much they obsess over the title, the abstract, or the concluding paragraphs.

In one sense, academics may know the triumph of high achievement (their work might be superb), but insofar as they write scholarly articles, they cannot be said to "strive to do the deeds." Finishing footnotes is a deed — but hardly "the deeds."

But there is a countervailing argument, and it comes from John Maynard Keynes:

The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.

Keynes's claim is the ultimate revenge of the nerds. Those "men in the arena"? They're slaves of the theorists. Those who "do the deeds"? They're marching to the beat of someone else's drum. And the drummer, it turns out, is an economist or political philosopher (or perhaps a professor of literature, history, or religion). In the end, it's the critic who counts. From the sidelines, he calls the tune.

Maybe Keynes is right. But his argument is unbecomingly self-serving; it is also very far from self-evidently correct. Do ideas rule the world? Keynes himself had some extraordinarily influential ideas, and so in his own case, that claim has a degree of truth. But are practical men — Theodore Roosevelt, Ronald Reagan, Barack Obama, Ted Cruz — really slaves of defunct economists? And what does "defunct" mean, exactly? Might today's officials, or titans of industry, be acting under the influence of outmoded ideas? Are they marching to the beat of academic drummers from the 1950s and 1960s? Are poets, as Shelley had it, the "unacknowledged legislators of the world"? Are professors of literature their chiefs of staff?

Common sense can be affected by academic influences, and is sometimes a product of it.

 In my view, Keynes wrote far too confidently about the role of intellectual influences. Practical people often seem to operate in accordance not with high theory but with some version of what is taken as common sense, perhaps traceable to intellectuals and theorists, but also a product of the intensely pragmatic judgments of colleagues, friends, and family members, and (perhaps above all) relevant cultural influences (religious organizations, labor unions, public interest groups, political parties, and movies and television, too). Common sense emerges from the interactions of numerous people, extending over time, and it creates the relevant music. (A great critic of Keynes, Friedrich Hayek, had relevant things to say about that, emphasizing how culture emerges spontaneously, not by top-down dictation. But Hayek was also of course an academic, and he continues to influence public officials)

Still, Keynes had a point. Common sense can be affected by academic influences, and is sometimes a product of it. It might seem self-evidently true that significant increases in the minimum wage would increase unemployment, or self-evidently true that they would not. Political correctness may or may not be politically correct. Scholarship helps determine what views count as common sense. Does it follow that academics enslave practical men? If scholars have the opportunity to serve in the White House, should they return to academe not with despair and a little shame, but with enthusiasm and energy?

My own field is law, where the debates over the usefulness of academic work are heated and, I think, exemplary. In a famous 1936 essay, "Goodbye to Law Reviews," the Yale law professor Fred Rodell wrote:

There are two things wrong with almost all legal writing. One is its style. The other is its content. That, I think, about covers the ground. And though it is in the law reviews that the most highly regarded legal literature — and I by no means except those fancy rationalizations of legal action called judicial opinions — is regularly embalmed, it is in the law reviews that a pennyworth of content is most frequently concealed beneath a pound of so-called style. The average law review writer is peculiarly able to say nothing with an air of great importance. When I used to read law reviews, I used constantly to be reminded of an elephant trying to swat a fly.

Bob Dylan once said, about Alicia Keys, "There's nothing about that girl I don't like." There's nothing I like about Rodell's article. He is smug, and he sneers, and he's full of contempt for both his students and his colleagues. Contempt is not the best thing to be full of, and in this case, it's unjustified. He is disparaging something that has real value. One reason is that truth matters, and academic work in law, as elsewhere, is frequently designed to figure out what's true. Another reason is that such work can be meticulous and it often explores first principles. That takes care and patience, and it's admirable.

Rodell wasn't opposed to the academic enterprise as such, but his article has a whiff of anti-intellectualism. Some modern critics of academe offer a bit more than a whiff. Justice Stephen Breyer was a distinguished professor of law, and he is unusually learned, but he complains: "There is evidence that law review articles have left terra firma to soar into outer space. Will the busy practitioner or judge want to read, in February's Harvard Law Review, 'The Paradox of Extra-legal Activism: Critical Legal Consciousness and Transformative Politics'?" (That's an awkward title, but the topic is not uninteresting.) Or consider the words of Chief Justice John Roberts:

Pick up a copy of any law review that you see, and the first article is likely to be, you know, the influence of Immanuel Kant on evidentiary approaches in 18th-century Bulgaria, or something, which I'm sure was of great interest to the academic that wrote it, but isn't of much help to the bar.

If you do pick up a copy of any law review you see, I doubt you'll find a discussion of that topic, but is it fair to ask whether and to what extent "help to the bar" is the appropriate criterion for legal scholarship?

Breyer and Roberts are speaking of the choice of topic, but there is also pervasive concern about academic writing itself, and it extends far beyond law. Revisiting his argument in 1962, Rodell wrote:

I now put the finger on style, not substance, as the greater evil. … Without a style that conceals all content and mangles all meaning, or lack of same, beneath impressive-sounding but unintelligible gibberish, most of the junk that reaches print in the law reviews and such scholarly journals could never get itself published anywhere — not even there. … I doubt that there are so many as a dozen professors of law in this whole country who could write an article about law, much less about anything else, and sell it, substantially as written, to a magazine of general circulation.

It's true, academic work could rarely be "sold" to such magazines. But why does that matter? The Quarterly Journal of Economics, California Law Review, Psychological Science, Political Science Quarterly, The American Historical Review, and Philosophy & Public Affairs do not have the same audience as Time, The Atlantic, or Commentary. The great essays of Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky on heuristics and prospect theory could not be published in general-interest magazines, and that is not a knock against Kahneman and Tversky. No such magazine would publish excerpts from Ronald Coase's papers on bargaining and transactions costs, Edna Ullmann-Margalit's book on social norms, Martin Weitzman's work on the limits of cost-benefit analysis for climate change, or Lisa Randall's technical papers on dark matter. So what?

Even excellent general-interest magazines look like pretty thin gruel -- mere bumper stickers, a kind of wind, even when written by professors.

For the record, Coase, Ullmann-Margalit, Weitzman, and Randall use technical language, but they do not mangle "all meaning, or lack of same, beneath impressive-sounding but unintelligible gibberish." They write for a specialized audience, and that's fine. All of them are interested in fundamental questions, and they approach those questions in ways that many general readers would find obscure. What might seem to be unintelligible gibberish, or jargon, often has precision, shorthand, and nuance that cannot be captured in ordinary language. From an abstract of one of Randall's recent papers:

"FDM also has interesting baryogenesis implications. One possibility is that both DM and baryon asymmetries are simultaneously diluted by a late entropy dump. Alternatively, FDM is compatible with an elegant non-thermal leptogenesis implementation in which decays of a heavy RH neutrino lead to late time reheating of the Standard Model and provide suitable conditions for creation of a lepton asymmetry."

I don't understand it, but that's my problem, not Randall's.

Essays in general-interest magazines could not be published in academic journals, and one reason is a lack of sufficient rigor. They might be clear and beautifully written, but usually they don't add much if anything to the stock of knowledge. In some ways, blogs are the modern equivalent of the magazines of Rodell's time, and even when they are written by professors, they are often glib, cheap, and superficial. That's not an objection to blogs; they have a distinctive audience of their own. (The world's best blog, by the way, is Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok's Marginal Revolution.) But for academics, general-interest outlets are hardly the gold standard.

One of the most valuable recent books of social theory is Well-Being and Fair Distribution (Oxford University Press, 2012) by Matthew Adler, a professor of law at Duke University. I doubt that Chief Justice Roberts would be enthusiastic about it. Consider this sentence, chosen at random:

"More specifically, a prioritarian SWF with a fairly modest degree of inequality aversion would say that we should be indifferent between increasing the well-being of an individual at level U by small amount Δu/K, and increasing the well-being of an individual at level KU by amount Δu."

As with Randall, general-interest readers would struggle to understand that sentence, and would puzzle over its relevance after that struggle. And yet Adler's book is a major contribution. It tells us a great deal about the moral standing of cost-benefit analysis — about its foundations and its limitations. True, it would take a great deal of further work to see how Adler's arguments might be applied; but the foundational analysis is significant. (I kept a copy of Adler's book in my government office.)

It is true that academic writing can be meaningless, that academics often lose themselves in abstractions, and that they sometimes use far too much jargon. Every year or so, every scholar should read George Orwell's "Politics and the English Language," which Richard Posner recommended to me in my first year as a law professor. (Decades later: Thanks, Dick!) Orwell offers valuable guidance that is systematically violated by academics. Part of the problem lies with journal editors, who often discourage creativity with respect to style or format.

More important, academic writing can exemplify what the social theorist Jon Elster calls "hard" and "soft" obscurantism. Hard obscurantism involves formal or mathematical work that can be exceptionally impressive, but that does not illuminate anything about reality; it is a kind of display. When economists bring formal models to bear on social problems, hard obscurantism is at least a risk.

Soft obscurantism is even worse. It involves complex, sometimes impenetrable abstractions and theories, which do not adhere to the proper standards for logical argument. Consider "functional explanations," which try to explain the existence of a phenomenon by pointing to its functions. The fact that some phenomenon X has some function Y does not mean that it exists because it has that function. (Functional explanations are easy to find in Marxism, postmodernism, history, and psychoanalysis, and also in Foucault.) And whenever large abstractions (such as "democracy" and especially "legitimacy") do more work than they should, a form of soft obscurantism is at work.

Jargon-filled or not, academic work often orients our politics, our culture, and our lives.

Even when it avoids obscurantism, some academic work can be seen as a form of exercise — or a marathon — in which the ultimate product is like a work of art, one that might be beautiful, but that will not attract much of an audience. Many superb articles and books fall into this category. As a highly distinguished professor once told me, "We write for our friends." Is excellent work its own reward? There is no obvious answer. Maybe so. What is clear is that academic work often adds to what humanity knows, and that should not be disparaged.

Such work often has a commitment to rigor, care, discipline, and sheer quality — to avoidance of the narrowly ideological and to mischaracterizing other people's arguments. When it comes to scholarship, fairness is a coin of the realm. When they are working well, academic journals discourage arguments that are glib, sloppy, or circular. They require conclusions to be earned. They also require both development of and sympathetic engagement with competing points of view, rather than easy or rapid dismissals. Counterarguments are encouraged, even mandatory. There is a kind of internal morality here, one that is connected with and helps account for some of its rigidity. The morality involves respect for the integrity of the process of argument, which entails respect for a wide range of arguers as well.

The literary critic Wayne Booth has written about the "implied author" — the character or persona behind the text, who may or may not be similar to the actual author. For all their diversity, academic articles tend to have broadly similar implied authors. They are usually careful, formal, earnest, diligent, serious, and fair-minded. They are rarely playful, funny, silly, joyful, angry, tricky, or outraged. There are exceptions, but that is the general pattern. And while the usual implied authors of academic articles may not be people you'd like to go out drinking with, you can probably trust them.

For Rodell, general-interest magazines were the standard, but rigor is not exactly their stock-in-trade. The arguments that can be found there are often lively, engaging, attention-grabbing, result-oriented, careless, and even a little ridiculous. As for people, so too for genres: Their vices are a product of their virtues. Many academics seem strongly drawn to popular outlets, producing blog posts or online columns, where significant numbers of readers might be found, and where publication is more immediate. Indeed, some academics seem to have abandoned — to some extent or altogether — academic journals and books in favor of popular outlets. Rodell might have applauded. But I do not think there is any reason for applause.

I wish, devoutly, that some of the immensely talented academics who write for popular outlets would reallocate some of their time to their academic work, which is less like popcorn. Sure, there's room for different kinds of writing. But whatever else they do, academic journals often display great care and rigor, in a way that can make op-eds, blog posts, and essays in even excellent general-interest magazines look like pretty thin gruel — mere bumper stickers, a kind of wind, even when written by professors.

A point for Keynes: Jargon-filled or not, academic work often orients our politics, our culture, and our lives. Whether or not they are anybody's slaves, those in the arena have good reason to celebrate it.

Cass R. Sunstein is a university professor at Harvard. His latest books, The World According to Star Wars (HarperCollins) and The Ethics of Influence (Cambridge University Press), will both be published later this year. A version of this article will appear in the Michigan Law Review.

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